On the Monday before Thanksgiving, smiling women dished out generous helpings of turkey, green beans and sweet potatoes inside the East Baltimore Development Inc. Community Resource Center, as little boys circled the crowded room with trays of lemon cake and pumpkin pie.

Hundreds of people - some dressed in their Sunday best, others in work clothes - squeezed to fit at the dozens of tables covered with yellow plastic tablecloths. Neighbors greeted each other with hugs. Old friends shouted above the live jazz music to catch up on grandchildren.

Outside, many homes are crumbling, lots stand empty and feral cats scrounge for food in the light from nearby Johns Hopkins Hospital. But inside, with the din of a hundred conversations and the aromas of a hearty dinner, there was an unmistakable feeling of community.

"Community" is the objective for the East Baltimore Development project, a $1.8 billion renewal plan that has razed a neighborhood and is now working to rebuild it.

The master plan shows hundreds of homes, a biotech park for the Johns Hopkins Medical Campus, shops and a school. But to create a real community, organizers and experts say, the "new Eastside" must be more than just a cluster of new buildings.

"A community is relationships between people, not relationships between buildings," said Sidney Brower, a professor of urban studies and planning at the University of Maryland, College Park.

"The buildings provide a common address, and living next to each other generates common interests. People get together around common interests, so there needs to be a mechanism to help people recognize their common interests and get together."

EBDI was created by Martin O'Malley, then the mayor of Baltimore, in 2003 to revitalize and redevelop the 88-acre area just north of the Johns Hopkins Medical Campus. The idea was to "transform over 80 acres of blighted, underused land into a thriving mixed-income, mixed-use community," creating up to 6,000 jobs, according to a state bond bill fact sheet from the project's origins.

Six years in, the project is still in its first phase. A seven-story biotech building opened in 2008 - the only one of five planned biotech buildings to open so far. Three rental properties have opened, offering about 200 rental units, mainly for low-income residents.

And while bond documents said the first phase would include 850 new or rehabilitated housing units, the first townhomes just went on the market.

"It's succeeding in many respects, and in other respects, it's kind of stuck," EBDI CEO Chris Shea said.

Commercial and residential development has stalled because of the economy. But rehabilitation and repair projects are slated to begin soon on nine homes, and EBDI officials expect to break ground this summer on a graduate student housing tower with more than 550 beds.

Many had given up on the neighborhood long before.

By 2003, 70 percent of the homes in the neighborhood were vacant.

Previous redevelopment projects had failed, officials said.

In 2000, the Historic East Baltimore Community Action Committee had been working for more than five years in the area - which used to be known as Middle East - in an effort to save the neighborhood. But houses were being abandoned faster than they could be rehabilitated. The number of vacant houses had nearly doubled in five years, and the organization had rehabilitated only a small fraction of what had been promised.

At the start of the project, the median sales price of a house in the Baltimore area at the time was $220,000, said Shea, but even the best-maintained rowhouses in the EBDI neighborhood were only valued at $30,000.

Still, not everyone was eager to move. Many who remained were reluctant to leave behind the homes in which they had spent so much of their lives.

Residents and EBDI representatives had meeting after meeting as they worked out the relocation packages for residents who were losing their homes.

"It's very, very hard on a lot of people," Shea said, but "you can do that hard work and be firm about it, and at the same time, recognize the hell that you're putting them through."

The project was not the first redevelopment effort in Baltimore, but it may be the most ambitious. While other, smaller, projects failed, EBDI officials jumped into what project officials say is the largest redevelopment project in Baltimore's history, with goals of transforming a neglected slum into a thriving mixed-income neighborhood.

"I get many professionals from across the country who go through here and their jaw kind of drops and they say, 'I've never seen anything like this,' " Shea said. "And that's not anything to be proud of."

From the beginning, he said, the project was designed to allow the original residents to benefit.

"If everything else happens the way that we have planned but we don't have a community, we haven't succeeded at all," said Sheila Young, vice president for development and communications for EBDI.Rosa Hart Burenstine grew up in a house on Jefferson Street, four blocks west of Hopkins. She said the neighborhood was beautiful and green when her family moved to the area in 1937.

"Everybody loved each other," she said of the neighborhood. "It was wonderful."

Middle-class families started to move out, and the area began a descent. Burenstine moved away, and when she returned, she was shocked at what had happened.

The problem was that anyone who could afford to leave did, said Sally MacConnell, vice president for facilities for Johns Hopkins Hospital and Health System and an original member of the EBDI board of directors.

"So what was left were elderly people on a fixed income who didn't feel like they could possibly afford to leave, or quite frankly, people who were involved in drugs, addicted to drugs," MacConnell said. "There were a lot of vacant houses, and there was a lot of drug activity, there was a lot of crime."

Though one biotechnology building has opened, the economic downturn pushed back the timeline for further biotech construction, MacConnell said.

Ashland Commons, a 78-unit low-income rental property, opened in December 2007. A year later, 55 percent of the units were rented to returning East Baltimore residents, according to EBDI's annual progress report.

Park View at Ashland Terrace, a 74-unit property for low-income adults 62 and older, opened in October 2007. The East Baltimore Community School opened this year with three grades, and will expand each of the next two years to include pre-kindergarten through eighth grade.

Quinetta Cooper is one of the new residents in Chapel Green, a 63-unit mixed-income rental community in the neighborhood. She said she loves her new home, which includes an unfinished basement and separate rooms for her two sons.

"I feel safe, I feel protected," Cooper said.

Shea said the community aspect is a key part of making the project successful.

"I do think we have to fundamentally differentiate ourselves from other neighborhoods like this. So we have to be very safe, we have to have a very distinctive housing product. ... It can't be just another East Baltimore rowhouse."